Your Company Might Think It Can Control Your Facebook Account Soon

Should your company tell
you to post their stuff on your Facebook?Flickr/j.lee43

Should an employer have some kind of claim on your online
activities?

The workplace of the future will likely say yes.

Your employer won't be able to log in to your Facebook or Twitter account, but it will subtly and not-so
subtly tell you what you should be doing on those sites.

Companies are starting to think they have a claim on social media
accounts because they are being forced to train workers about
them.

Older workers might be fine with using Facebook to post photos,
but clueless on how to use a Facebook group to communicate or how
to use check-ins to locate hot prospects.

"By 2020, 50% of the workplace will be millennials," says Jeanne
Meister, co-founder of human resources research firm Future Workplace and co-author
of the book The 2020
Workplace..

"They have a comfort not just with Twitter and Facebook but with
all social media, including social discovery apps like Glancee,
Banjo and Highlight. All of us will have to develop a Millennial
mindset to stay employable in the workplace."

Jeanne Meister, founder of
Future WorkplaceFuture
Workplace

So companies like Dell, Intel, Unisys, GAP, Pepsi are starting to do mandatory
training on how to use these tools, Meister says.

They aren't just training employees how to use these sites, but
how to represent the company to their friends. "What should you
not be sharing? What can you share in a responsible way that
helps the company build its brand in the market place?" says
Meister.

For instance, when a company launches new product, friends on
Facebook might ask what the employee thinks of it. Employees
should know what they can safely say without getting in trouble
at work. That seems fair.

But should the company go so far as to ask employees to use their
personal social networks to help market brands or products?

Pepsi is playing with idea now. It did research that showed that
among its 300,000 employees each person has on average had about
130 friends on Facebook. That's a giant social network to tap
when it launches a new flavor. They added share buttons on
internal newsletters and trained employees how to post these
kinds of internal articles to their friends, Meister says.

It's a small leap from asking to expecting.

If a company takes on the responsibility of training workers to
use social media for their jobs, is it entitled to a quid pro quo
telling employees to post marketing materials on their social
networks?